Friday, January 25, 2008

Leadership changes at ABB I see that there are some leadership changes at the US division of ABB. If you recall, Enrique Santacana became President and CEO when Dinesh Paliwal left to become CEO of Harmon Industries. Now, Greg Sheu, currently senior vice president of the Automation Products division in North America will shift over to head the Power Products division--a larger business unit. Replacing him at the Automation business will be Rick Hepperla, who currently is Local Business Unit Manager of ABB's North American low voltage drives unit. Each will report to Santacana, as well as having roles in the global management teams of their respective divisions. 6:58:36 PM    comment []

Trips I'm wrapping up a southern California trip. I've been at the President's Club for about 13 hours now. Timing was bad. The last plane to Cleveland took off about the time I was wrapping up the Webcast and the next one leaves in about 2 hours. I moderated the Webcast from here sponsored by Bosch Rexroth on electronic line shafting. You can see it on-demand (along with a bunch of other ones) on our Web site. That Webcast was promoted pretty narrowly toward converting and printing industries, but the ideas are a little more widely applicable. After the Solid Works user group meeting--which by the way had 4,600 attendees up 1,000 over last year--we headed north and stopped at Kontron. I originally knew the company as Industrial Computer Source. It acquired Teknor, PEP Modular, Dolch and others. Still broadly in computers, but it does some custom systems. I'm sure there will be more to say later. Then we went to Opto 22 to see what was new there--and that would be video for the Web. Seven or eight years ago I participated in a live streaming video Webcast with Benson that was somewhat ill-fated. Technology is much better now. Don't be surprised if you see Benson and me talking technical from their new studio sometime this year. There were several meetings another hour north at Wonderware after a brief stop at Triconex. I really appreciated Luis Duran of Triconex taking some time to give me ideas on covering safety. At Wonderware, there wasn't much News but what I took away was that Mike Bradley had accomplished a lot and took the company to "Wonderware 2.0" and now Sudipta Bhattacharya, the new CEO, has initiated a reorganization designed to take it to "Wonderware 3.0." (That is if you catch the analogue to Web nomenclature.) Sudipta could be the right person at the right time for the company, and certainly everyone seemed enthused about going forward. I promised Adrienne Lutovsky of ProSoft Technology that I'd stop by on my next trip to California. Didn't know it was almost 3 hours north of Wonderware. If you read about the closing of I5 and the stranding of a bunch of motorists, well, that could have been me. We made it out of Bakersfield and over the mountain pass barely two hours before they closed the freeway. At ProSoft, we met the new--as of less than two weeks--director of marketing. Looks like there will be a bunch of product news coming shortly. And since Andreas, the new marketing head, is ex-Rockwell, I expect to see a more focused but stronger strategy going forward. Home on Friday to record a podcast with Dust Networks for Automation Minutes. Hope to have it posted over the weekend. The subject, of course, will be low power wireless sensor networks. 1:17:02 AM    comment []